


Going Home

by INMH



Category: Bully (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Drama, General, Homesickness, Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-04-09 18:02:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4358846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can’t believe it, but he wants to go back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going Home

The first week home from Bullworth passes easily enough.

Jimmy eats his cereal straight-faced as his mother lectures him, gesticulating sharply despite the fact that she’s got a cigarette in her right hand and every move sends burning specks of ash onto the table and floor. She reminds him that he’s been expelled too many times and he almost did it again God damn it Jimmy, if he gets kicked out of this goddamn school she’s shipping his ass off to military school without a second thought, his father’s opinion be damned, if he wants to do something about it he can come down and parent Jimmy himself-

Jimmy tunes out about halfway through the lecture. Ultimately, it’s all just a warning and she’s not going to ground him or do anything worth worrying about. He didn’t get expelled, and that’s all that matters to her or anyone else.

They’re in a new house once again, this time in Ohio, and whatever-the-hell-his-name-was was gone. That isn’t unusual; his mother can’t hold down a husband to save her life, and he is reasonably certain that the money she’s received from the divorce have paid for the relatively nice house they’re currently living in. The first week, Jimmy spends his time picking the house apart while his mother is out, and that occupies his time well enough.

The next week, not so much.

Boredom sets in quickly. With Bullworth, there were options: Stay in your room and read, do homework, go into town and see a movie, get something to eat, humor Thad and Bucky and go play Grottoes and Gremlins for a while- or just find someone and talk, because there was never any shortage of people at the Academy or in town.

Here, there is no one. His mother is gone most of the day. They live a significant distance from town, and he doesn’t have a bike anymore. Jimmy still has his skateboard, but that sort of distance on skateboard isn’t something he’s interested in doing every day. Town isn’t that great either; not much to do, not much to see. And so he stays home, simmers in the boredom, sketches and picks through his notebooks and starts penning a letter to Petey out of sheer, endless _boredom_.

Jimmy remembers Bullworth. He remembers messing with people on Halloween, remembers sleeping at the back of Hattrick’s class when he could get away with it, remembers listening to Gary’s extensive commentary about Miss Peters’ previous theater productions and how _lucky_ he should feel that he only got saddled with the nutcracker role, remembers Petey’s nervous and awkward attempts at friendship, remembers his nights with Zoe particularly well and wonders if she’s moved on since he left…

And damn it, he’s _lonely_.

Loneliness isn’t something he’s felt in any serious way since he was a kid. Jimmy’s always been alone: Alone in his house because his mother was always busy with a new guy, lonely in school because they moved a lot and he was always the new kid, and even lonely with his dad plenty of times because he had to work, or take care of some other business.

When you’re alone consistently enough, you learn to entertain yourself. Soon people become a burden, annoying, distracting, because why would you want to sit through some dumb movie you don’t even like for the sake of making friends when you could just as easily be off doing what you want? Taking friends took time and effort; Jimmy wasn’t inclined to wasting either.

If someone had told him when he had first arrived at Bullworth that he would be lonely for the place, missing the crazy-ass people and the crazy-ass town and the crazy-ass school where he’d been beaten up and bullied and tricked and screwed over on several separate occasions, Jimmy would have laughed himself unconscious. Miss Bullworth? Not possible.  
  
But he did.

Whether he likes it or not, whether he _tried_ or not, he’s made friends there. He was happier there than he is here, with his mother, doing the same dysfunctional song and dance that they’ve been doing for the last almost sixteen years. God, that Jimmy felt more acceptance from a shy kid in a pink shirt and an alcoholic English teacher than he does from his own mother is depressing.  
  
He wants to go back.

There are no plans to visit his dad anytime soon, and that means that Jimmy’s going to be stuck with his mother, in this house, for the next two months. Two months without friends, two months without any meaningful contact, two months without any real freedom to do as he wanted.

Jimmy finds himself missing his bed in his room in the dorms. It had taken a while to get used to it, taken a while to get the room overall just the way he liked it, but finally it had started to feel like something home-y. Petey and Zoe had come and visited with him there- Gary too, when they weren’t trying to kill each other. It had been a place where, sure, he had idiots trying to knock down his door because he’d slung a rock at them or made them trip on marbles, but he didn’t have to worry about his mother- or one of her husbands- giving him more stress than he could handle. There weren’t adults in the boys’ dorm; that had been a major stress-reducer, bullies or not.  
  
Jimmy lies on his bed, picks through the box of photographs he took around town and the campus: The football field, the Observatory, the main school building, New Coventry and the dorms and the lighthouse in Old Bullworth Vale…

And as insane and unreasonable and strange as it is, he thinks,

 _I want to go home._  
  
-End


End file.
